S11E04 - Fire

The session starts with a flashback to Port Nyanzaru during the end-of-season celebration party held in honor of our heroes after destroying the Soulmonger.

During the party, Avilos is wondering what to do next when Azionna approaches him and tries to persuade him to become his halfling pet. Unsure about the proposal, Avilos agrees to spend the night with her. During the steamy night, Azionna makes use of a wide range of spells like mirror image, detect thoughts, mage hand, ray of frost, in ways that Avilos are so kinky to be illegal, but it doesn’t help the bard make a decision.

The next morning, with his whole body aching, he considers one last time his options: staying with Azionna, going back to his hometown village with his childhood crushes, accompanying Ellie and Chos on their quest to Eastern lands, disappearing into the jungle with the triceraptos-riding grung and the rest of the jungle fun, staying with Sophi and Ada in their soon-to-be-built mansion, or going with Krariak to the Ice Kingdoms to hunt for a badass axe. He closes his eyes and sees his path: help the barbarian find the axe.

Flash-back over.

We’re now back to the current season, where the heroes have just returned to Jinu’s farm after another day stealing the mail from carts and destroying the means and lives of innocent merchants.

Ike, who had found one of the letters addressed to Sister Gloria, reads it to the group.

Chos then reads the other letter addressed to Sister Gloria that the group had.

Putting all together, the group decides to go see Sister Gloria the next day and tell her what they found, betraying their pretty patron, Azaernara.

A while later, Ike tries to persuade Lyra to give him another sip from the vial that Azaernara gave her at the same time that she gave her their current mission, but Lyra refuses. Concerned about Ike’s increasingly junkie tendencies, Gray casts purify water on Lyra’s vial, which slightly alters the liquid’s color. Later, Lyra climbs a nearby tree to sleep in nature. Ike follows her, tries to but fails to persuade her to drink more of the vial, and goes back into the house, with slightly jerky movements. Once inside, he calms himself by having another footbath near the window while Jinu and him read another of Jinu’s necromancy books.

After a while, Jinu goes to sleep, and Ike goes into rest mode. Jinu does tell Nemo that that night he’s tired and he can’t do hanky panky.

While resting, Ike has another dreamy vision involving the demonic voice that he first heard last night. The voice incites him to eat Nemo’s heart, and while Ike listens, he does so with interest, not worrying much about either the demonic voice or the fact that he’s never dreamt or had visions like this before.

“Wood and string, pretending at life… tell me, do you ever wonder whose dream you really are?

That gnome — Nemo — he watches you as one might a caged beast. He fears what you could become if you were free.

But I see you as you truly are. Not a puppet. Not a toy. A vessel. Hollow only until something fills you.

His heart beats with what you lack — warmth, pulse, purpose. One taste, and you would know what it means to live.

The first bite will sound like thunder in your skull. The second will make the strings burn away.

And when his heart stills in your hands… I will breathe into you. You will no longer dream of being real. You will be.

Come now… wake, little marionette. Let’s carve your name into the world.”

Early next morning, Gray and Nemo go see Sister Gloria to hand over her letters. Jinu accompanies them to get supplies. At the farm, Ike starts necrotic poison practice exercises that Jinu gave him, and Lyra goes to spend time with the farm’s animals, keeping a safe distance from the zombies that are tending the land. She also leaves a hidden message in the forest asking if anyone knows what WWW means.

As Jinu, Gray, and Nemo enter Ironwound, they part ways with Jinu going to the market while our two heroes head to the Guard house. There, they are told that Sister Gloria won’t arrive for a while, so to make time, Gray goes to help townsfolk clean a poisoned well while Nemo stays close to the guard house. After a few minutes, one of the guards joins him during a short break, but due to the guard’s inferiority complex and short cigar, the exchange isn’t productive.

After that encounter, Nemo writes a hidden message in the secret language of thieves on one of the street houses’ walls, asking also about WWW. Also, while waiting, he sees a red-scaled and very overweight dragonborn walk by with a white and orange dragonborn companion. Interested, he follows them until they reach the town’s outskirts, but then decides to walk back to the guard’s house instead of following them into the forest.

Meanwhile, Gray who finds a group of villagers he could help, casts purify water on a poisoned well after the villagers remove a dead goat that had been thrown inside. Feeling good for a good deed, the paladin then returns to the guard’s house and joins Nemo in time to meet Sister Gloria. The heroes hand the scary-looking assassin nun their letters and, after a thorough interrogation and several “you’re going to prison” near misses, the heroes manage to leave the building without handcuffs. Nemo takes mental note to never again let the psychopath, self-implicating paladin, talk to the police. The two heroes also take note of Sister Gloria’s observation that she would enjoy finding a barely defensible reason to lock the two self-appointed vigilantes up who like reading other people’s letters.

After leaving the guard house, the rogue and the paladin stumble upon a blue-skinned air genasi monk called Soto. He’s seeking a warforged called XV-7. The monk accuses XV-7 of causing the death of a group of merry elderly gnomes on a regional government-subsidized holiday trip. While the heroes are thinking what to do, Jinu arrives and invites the genasi to join them for breakfast at his farm. And that’s where they go next.

At the same time, in the forest, Lyra is strolling in the forest and finds the raven that has been following her over the last few weeks and a strange-looking card on the ground next to it. She picks up the card but resists the temptation to use it, and then she uses her telepathic “talk with animals” spell to ask the raven about Azaernara. The laconic raven, though, doesn’t share more than a handful of words: hungry, Pico, danger, scary, frozen.

Nearby, at the farm, Ike completes three of his four homework concoctions and, wisely, waits for Jinu before doing anything with them.

Not much later, Jinu and the rest of the party arrive back at the farm, and Soto is introduced. Then Ike shows Jinu his potion vials, and one of them, which was starting to corrode, is quickly taken out of the house and thrown outside, creating a patch of necrotically damaged soil that smells like rotten eggs mixed with overripe fruit.

After Jinu finishes preparing a chicken dish for brunch, they all sit together to share what they’ve found. Soto makes his first contribution, revealing that the WWW acronym mentioned in the letters stands for the Wicked Whiskey Wharf, a pirate smuggling town in the North. The party then continues debating what to do next while Jinu goes out for a walk.

A while later on the tiefling is back, panting. The farm isn’t in danger, but there’s a big forest fire approaching the town. Everybody except Ike grabs their things and runs towards the fire to help, while the wooden doll responds to an innate urge to sprint in the opposite direction.

After a few minutes, Ike stumbles upon a group of warforged eating in a forest clearing. The leader, presenting himself as XV-7, is a stuttering, vengeful, sadistic warforged with a glitchy voice. He tells Ike that they are members of the Severance Protocol and easily persuades him to join the rebel group. After getting marked with a hot iron bearing the symbol of the group, Ike carefully listens to their plan to detonate a bomb on a river edge, on one of the mountain sides that surrounds Ironwound. Their intention is to cause massive chaos and suffering to Ironwound’s flesh bags as payback for years of oppression from the surrounding human and dwarven kingdoms against them.

Ike thinks that’s a cool idea.

During their conversation, Rock-2 arrives, and Ike recognizes him as the warforged that the party had met the night before while he was throwing dead goats into wells.

After another discussion, Ike persuades XV-7 that Ike’s fleshy friends could be useful to the Severance Protocol as a sub-cell because he’s their leader. XV-7 officially promotes him to sub-cell leader and our wooden hero parts after agreeing to meet the warforged nightly in order to sync up.

Somewhere else in the mountains, the rest of the party arrives at the rapidly advancing fire and meets the two dragonborn that Nemo saw in town, and a third dragonborn that they hadn’t seen before. The heroes question the panting obese dragonborn, but he doesn’t give a very convincing answer about what they were doing, while faint smoke is coming out of the corners of his mouth. Not someone who is used to being told what to do, the red dragonborn continues laboriously walking uphill towards the city, followed by his companions. Nemo, Lyra, and Soto follow them sneakily, while Gray runs towards the fire with what looks like a half-baked suicide plan.

On the lower part of the valley, the paladin arrives at the fire’s edge, where he hears a familiar voice asking for help. He casts fire resistance on himself and runs through the fire towards the voice and finds the halfling girl whose cart the group robbed and destroyed. Next to her is her mother, unconscious. Gray casts resistance on the shell-shocked, crying girl, grabs the mom, and puts her over his shoulders, and runs towards the bottom of the valley, hoping that the fire will now be mostly gone there.

After two confusing rounds, mother and daughter are dead and on fire, and Gray is down to half his hit points. He reconsiders his plan and does the fastest hill sprint he’s ever done, getting out of the fire in time to see a group of villagers and guards that just arrived, trying to contain the fire. Realizing he’s not going to be of much help there, he walks the now scarily close distance to Ironwound and meets the rest of the group.

While the group is deciding how to best help the town against the approaching fire, a smoke grenade smashes in front of them, surrounding them with darkness. During the following confusing seconds, a mastiff comes out of nowhere, enters the cloud of smoke, grabs a surprised Lyra, pulls her out of the cloud, and drags her to a tall man covered in bear skins, who then ties her to the back of a horse, spanks the horse and man, mastiff and horse sprint each in a different direction.